MANY TRAILS OF TEARS

By Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A.
#490 Column Written 1/15/2001 All Rights Reserved

An anthropologist comes up to an Indian, and asks him  what did the Indians call America before the whites  came, and the Indian replies, "Ours."  - Vine Deloria, Native Activist

When the phrase "Trail of Tears" is used, many people  think of the horrendous death march of the Cherokee  peoples, from what is now called Georgia, to  reservations in the Western territories.  Thousands  died during the forced march, from cold, from  sickness, from heartbreak at the idea of leaving their  ancestral lands, to satisfy the land greed of the  white settlers.

There were however, many such trails of tears that  have occurred across the land we now call America,  most of which are ignored, and forgotten in the  national amnesia that we call history.

Of course, even in that infamous Trail of Tears of the  Cherokee dispossessed, there was a trail within a  trail, as the Cherokee, one of the so-called Five  Civilized Tribes, imitated white people in some ways,  including the possession of black slaves.  On that  trail, along with Cherokee, were hundreds, perhaps  thousands, of blacks held in captivity.  There is  uncertainty over how many because few people felt it  important enough to keep count.

From the tropical swamps and lowlands of what is now  called Florida another indigenous people, the  Seminoles, were forced along a deadly trail.   Florida  was the setting of at least three spheres of global  conflict: the interests of Spain, the British, and the  Americans (the French were involved relatively  briefly).  Caught in the middle, were Indian and  African peoples.  

For Seminoles (who broke away from their Creek kin)  Florida was home, as it was the home of the Timuquan,  Muskhogean, and Apalachee people before them.  It was  here, in the early 1500s, that the Spanish sought the  hidden Fountain of Youth.  It was here that perhaps  the oldest European city was begun, St. Augustine,  around 1565.  And it was here, that land greed spelled  the beginning of the end for free Seminole life on  their ancestral lands.  For whether it was the  Spanish, the French, the English, or the Americans,  the expansion of white settlement means the  contraction of red lands, and in several hundred  years, their removal.

When Spanish authorities were in possession of the  territory, their relative weakness in terms of  population, army, and immigration, forced them to make  the territory attractive to those who would defend her  imperial interests.  The Spanish Crown therefore  ordered that any black person who escaped from slavery  in the Anglo "north" (of Georgia or the Carolinas)  would be free in Florida, if they swore to bear arms  and defend it.  Thousands did.  The famous Stono  Rebellion, where hundreds of black captives, armed  with makeshift weapons, drumming, marched towards St.  Augustine, gives some idea of Florida's appeal.  It  also gives some idea of why Georgia and the Carolinas  (and the United States) wanted to take Florida from  Spain: to extend slavery.  This factor also gives some  idea of why the Seminoles were always the object of  U.S. derision and hostility.  The Seminoles,  themselves a breakaway branch of the Creek Confederacy  (the name is said to mean runaway or break away),  treated their African runaways as friends, and fought  hard to resist American attempts to recapture and to  reenslave blacks who became members of the Nation.   Americans were critical of what U.S. General Thomas S.  Jesup called "the influence of the Negroes" upon the  Seminole council.

After at least three devastating wars, trickery,  deceit, and cheating, the Seminoles were marched off  to Oklahoma.  There, they were given inferior lands,  none of the promised equipment, clothing, blankets, or  food was provided.  They were overcharged, and left on  land that was promised to the Creeks.

While some army records suggests over 4,000 Seminoles  died during the deadly trek west, no figure accurately  recorded those who died after arrival in Oklahoma.   What mattered to the Americans was that they were  gone.

They were further devastated by the Civil War, as they  were once again, put in between the fights of others,  and punished after the war, by still more land theft.

The history of the relationship between the settlers  and the native peoples of the Americas is one of naked  injustice, greed, violence and death.

It is but one feature of a rarely told, and little  known, facet of American history. (c)MAJ 2001

 

Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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